Gabriel Koenig

Remixes

Indaba Mashup

This was another remix competition hosted by Indaba music. We were provided with stems from 11 different songs by 9 different artists and could do essentially whatever we wanted. I didn’t know most of the tracks so it was somewhat challenging just to know exactly what I had. I cut everything up in Ardour which worked well, but some things like time stretch and pitch shift weren’t quite as good as I might have liked. I really enjoyed the challenge of trying to match up different melodies and rhythms to fit with one another and I feel like most of it turned out pretty well. I tried to use at least one stem from every song but I may have left out one or two. I didn’t record anything new for this track, and I used effects extremely minimally.

The entire album Fantasies has been made available for remixing. I love the album so I’d really like to get around to remixing every track at some point, but for the purposes of the contest I remixed the track “Gold Guns Girls”. It’s definitely one of the most pumped up tracks and one of my favorites. My original idea for the remix didn’t really work out so I ended up going in a totally different direction. I cut the tempo in half and used only the vocal tracks and a piano part from the original. I think my preferred way to approach a remix is using only the original vocals, if only because it becomes more difficult to mesh things with the other existing tracks. In this case I didn’t really have much choice with the drastic tempo cut. I recorded and mixed everything in Ardour, using hydrogen for a drum part. One of my favorite things about the remix is that it sounds like it could still be an original Metric song, the instrumentation seems similar enough to their other stuff. I had a great time creating this remix once it got started and I’m looking forward to trying out some more of their tracks in the future. I’ve already downloaded all the stems so it’s only a matter of time…

Remixing this song was really the first time that I’ve used Ardour for any extensive audio editing. I have to say it was great. I also used Hydrogen, the linux drum machine, which is not only awesome in its own right, but syncs with Ardour perfectly. For the remix I only used the vocal tracks from the original. Everything else I recorded myself using my MicroKorg. I used a similar compositional structure to the original song, I didn’t mix it up too much, I think it was more of a re-instrumentation. I really enjoyed working with a song that had already been written and then just re-recording the parts that I wanted to. It was a nice break from having to do everything from scratch.